Project description

TELL-ability is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (dnr 2022-02920) conducted at Karlstad University by Erica Sandlund, Birgitta Ljung Egeland, Silivia Kunitz and Christina Olin-Scheller during 2023-2025.

The telling and sharing of stories have long been viewed as central to human experience, memory, and imagination. In this project oral storytelling in social interaction is approached as a specific type of narrative competence: as a collaborative achievement and an aspect of L2 interactional competence (IC). While the importance of narrative competencies is emphasized in the literature, knowledge about the practices and potential of oral storytelling in compulsory education; in particular, in second language (L2) teaching and learning is sparse. The present project aims to address several of the gaps identified in previous research with an exclusive focus on oral storytelling in two language subjects in Sweden – English as a foreign language and Swedish as a second language in secondary school. We investigate storytelling in and for practicing L2 proficiency and IC , and for broader goals of education, such as preparing students for participation in a globalized, multilingual, and multicuItural society.

The study consist of three work packages, and data includes teacher interviews, learner life-story interviews, video-recorded classroom implementation of narrative tasks, and textbooks. Video data analyzed using CA will allow us to describe the interactional features of the students’ interaction while working with the tasks.  

The long-term goal of this research is to gain knowledge which can support: oral narrative engagement in learners, a narrative approach to L2 teaching, and awareness of the functions and practices of storytelling in social interaction in and for L2 education.